He ends his whole thread with:

>If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution).

Yet all his thread does is criticize this petition without trying to understand and work with the person who wrote it. I understand that a CEO would be very unhappy at something like this and I can't fault him for feeling that way, but he'd do well to listen to his own point in this instance - "be a part of the solution".

The petitioners publicly called for the ousting of senior executives, while airing confidential dirty laundry. The idea that this deserves to be met with a receptive and empathetic response is absurd. If you want collaboration, approach collaboratively. You might not get what you want, but at the end of the day, a company needs to be led by somebody, and I would much rather be led by a designated leader than by public pressure campaigns brought by whatever employees are most willing to escalate their grievances to the public square.

Do you have backchannel information to suggest that the collaborative approach wasn't tried first? In my experience, going public never is the first step people take.

I have no inside info about this, but it wouldn't change my opinion if there had been an internal ask first. It's a fact of life that sometimes you will lose the argument, and fail to convince others of your ideas, even when you care deeply. I have been there, and it sucks. At that point, you can chose to stay and live with it, or decide it's a dealbreaker for you and move on.

The third option -- to escalate the argument to the public square and enlist the public as allies -- is available, but think what would happen if everybody did this. In a company of thousands of people there will always be passionate disagreement. If companies tolerated this kind of public escalation, it would erode the trust that is necessary for any organization to operate. It would be its own kind of toxic culture.

> while airing confidential dirty laundry

I mean, being silent about company dirty laundry is not exactly virtue.

Nope.

If you're leaking about something that's genuinely concerning (criminal, or just very bad and immoral), by all means, leak it.

But this seems more of a leak to make some noise, to win an argument by public opinion. Nothing but a political stunt. Not very virtuous.

I disagree.

It's not a political stunt. The people who haven't left clearly want to remain their for various reasons asides from the issues they expressed. It's an attempt from those employees to actually improve the company and address the issues they have.

It's a publicly traded company. The shareholders have a right to know if the company is being mismanaged, so they can take action to improve management of the company they own.

There is a middle ground between saying nothing and raising it to the general public. The public square is a terrible place to litigate what are effectively unsourced, one-sided allegations.

Brian has an exceptionally long history of holding himself to a dramatically lower standard than he holds his employees. It is hard to imagine a reason that he would change.

I've met him. One of the biggest jerks I've encountered among Bay-area founders.

I get where you're coming from - this response seemed overly harsh. But I do think there's an important difference - this petition is anonymous and criticizes three people by name. Armstrong's response criticizes nobody by name (he couldn't!)

If he knew their name(s), he would have just fired them. Posting anonymously is the only real option they have if they love the company but think leadership has gone astray.

The power dynamics of criticizing 3 public executives is far different than berating some employees who will most likely be fired.

Yeah, but the employees aren’t exactly in a position of power here. He already indirectly said “it’s good I can’t name you, because you’d be fired now”.